Calling the Gods Read online

  One surfaced beside me, nodded to flip its herring head-downward. It swallowed — the neck thickened — swallowed again, and the herring disappeared. When I looked back, the gannet was taking off, feet spanking the water; there was a jolt through the line, and I pulled in a karfish, a dazzle of silver and green.

  I looked around the horizon again, knocked the karfish on the head, took a knife stuck inside the boat’s ribs, cut its throat and drank the blood. Sliced off a strip of flesh, sweet and juicy. I filleted and cut the rest into strips, chewing them for the moisture as well as the flesh. Twice again that morning, I pulled in another karfish, and covered it from the sun. And still I sailed north, parallel to my original course to Rabbit Island, or that is what I hoped.

  Mid-afternoon, I bundled both sails at the foot of the mast, searched sea and horizon, searched it again, quarter by quarter, and slept.

  I woke after dark, hung over the side to pee, ate some karfish, and set the boat to rights, lashing the sails out of my boat over the barrels and baskets of gear Ennish had put aboard. There was a net. I slid spears, oars, and arrows out of the way, and set off again, keeping direction by the same stars. Towards morning, I turned east to complete the long leg towards where Rabbit Island should be but did not find it, so heaved to and slept through the afternoon, waking before dark. The wind had gone around into the west, and I ran before it.

  I kept telling myself the island must be ahead because there were blackbacks flying that way, because the waves felt different through the hull, as if they sent some message from land. But what if I had made a great circle, and was heading back towards Hornish? I kept looking ahead for peaks, and for the other boat that might still be searching.

  “They must have given up by now,” I said aloud. The sky overcast, I could not see the stars, but kept on all night with the wind out of the west at my back.

  When Rabbit Island swam into the morning light, I cried but sailed right around before landing. No sign of anyone else.

  Tide halfway out, I carried the anchor well up the beach, set it firm, and climbed to the top of the island. A quick look all around, then a slow search of the sea south, east, west and north. Although I wanted to examine the stores and tools Ennish had put aboard, my head was too heavy. I collapsed on sand in the boat’s shadow. That way I could be sure of waking, when the tide came back in.

  Chapter Ten

  Singing and Telling Ennish His Story

  Eyeless, the white face mooned and slid towards me through the water, and hearing somebody’s shrieks I woke from the stench of nightmare, climbed the island, and searched the sea again, quarter by quarter.

  The tide was lifting, the boat bumping, so I carried the anchor further up. The sun had moved around while I slept, the skin on the backs of both legs hot and tight. I took my breaker to the waterhole under the toppled wall, then remembered and ran to examine Ennish’s stores.

  The first flax basket was filled with dried whale meat, smoked herrings, and a great loaf of bread, enough to have lasted us several days. At the thought of Ennish smiling to himself, the warmth in his grey eyes, I burst into tears, hammered the side of the boat, and struck sharp barnacles. Snivelling, gulping, sucking my stinging knuckles, tasting the furry blood, I embraced the planks where his body had scraped on its long plunge.

  “I wasn’t there when you needed me …”

  Again, it was the humdrum that brought me back to myself: I chewed a piece of black whale meat, broke off a crust of bread, and thought I must not give in to self-pity, not if I was to save my brothers. I made myself grin at my seriousness, just as Ennish would have done, and brought the boat a bit further up on the tide.

  It was one of the village’s fishing boats, newer, stronger, and more seaworthy than my smaller one, but too heavy to drag up the beach. That was a nuisance, but the longer boat had already saved my life with its speed.

  Two full water breakers, shovel, axe, two more knives. Leather pouches of hooks and lures, fishing lines, rolls of cord. Several kegs of oats and barley, and another filled with pouches of vegetable seeds. A leather bag with flints and steel, burnt-cloth tinder, and a ball of teased-out rope. Needles and awls.

  “You always were thorough,” I told Ennish.

  A barrel of whale oil in the bows, the net — ready for use, coils of rope, and, under them, great wooden pulley blocks with iron sheaves and hooks. I could pull the boat up the beach after all.

  The fishing gear would have been aboard for the next day’s work, but Ennish must have smuggled down the rest in the dark. Was that when he was seen?

  Then I thought of the relief everyone would have felt at the thought that all evil was driven out with me, the village cleansed. I remembered feeling it myself after other banishings. Those women — Tilsa, Ulseb, Larish — would have slept heavily. Perhaps that was when Ennish had loaded his boat and sailed, but somebody was still on watch.

  No. Had he died then, his body would have been much more decayed. He must have waited several days, trying to find the boys, then been shot by the lookouts on the Horns as he sailed to meet me. Did that mean Tobik, Peck, and Patch were prisoners, or something worse?

  Death to us in Hornish was a thief of memory, a sort of forgetting. Once the dead had been returned to the depths, it was the duty of the living to give them back their memory so they could live for ever, telling stories with the gods beneath the sea. Tide now dropping, the boat safe, the rest of that day I sat on the sand beside it, telling Ennish his story.

  “We were born the same year, within a few days of each other …”

  We grew up playing with the other children in the golden sand under the red-flowered mercy trees, splashing in the shallow, warm water of the bay that opened towards the sun. We swam before we walked, sailed toy boats, searched for scallops and mussels, set our little nets and lines, made fish traps from sticks, and shrieked at a shrimp or a herring caught as the tide dropped.

  We played, learning to row and sail our small boats. A child of Hornish must know the sea, how to handle a boat, to fish and preserve the catch.

  We followed our fathers and mothers in their digging and planting, begging seeds and plants for our little gardens. In the orchards, we climbed and picked fruit from the top branches.

  We copied our mothers, learning to cook, to grind the oats and barley we had helped plant and harvest, how to milk the goats and make cheese, to feed the pigs in their strong enclosures. Pigs are clever creatures, quick to find weakness in a wall. And we learned how to kill and butcher the animals, to cure their skins, and preserve the meat.

  So I told Ennish how we grew up in Hornish, two small people like brother and sister. I told him how Hulsa laughed and said that where one was, she would always find the other. Then I became the Selene, learning the whale songs from two old women each of whom had been the Selene until her powers waned like the dying moon.

  I repeated everything I learned to Ennish, the secret songs and dances, those I sang alone in the Great House and as I swam. Nothing of that seemed wrong. As we explored the world about us, we explored each other, in thought and flesh. All this I told Ennish beside the boat on Rabbit Island, my words travelling through the water to where he now lived with the gods beneath the sea. And I told him the history of our village, because death would have stolen that memory, too.

  Long before we were born, life changed at Hornish. Each autumn, herrings shoaled in a bay one full day’s sail south down the west coast. Women and children were landed on a beach behind a reef at the old fishing camp. As we re-thatched torn roofs and rebuilt walls damaged by winter storms, the first boat would come in awash with netted herrings that we scaled, gutted, and strung on lines between poles on the beach. While the first catch dried in sun and wind, we salted the next in barrels bound tight with split supplejack; the next we smoked, a treat for winter feasts.

  When the shoals disappeared, we sailed the herrings home, boats low in the water, praising the gods for their gifts. The children cried and waved
goodbye to the fishing camp because it was a happy time for us, playing in the warm lagoon behind the beach, climbing and jumping in the sandhills, collecting driftwood for the fires, yet we always greeted the Horns with songs, running up from the jetty, shouting to those left behind, finding a neglected toy on a bed, running to tell the pigs we were back.

  I chanted the old story to Ennish of that summer when the herrings were so plentiful the boats had to return for a second load, and how halfway back to Hornish the last two were caught in a storm. The men tried to make the fishing camp behind its protective reef, but were driven south past the bay, so they hove-to. As the gale whipped the crests off the waves, they lowered their masts and dribbled whale oil from the barrel always carried in the bows. The waves were still as high, but the crests smoothed and no longer broke into the boats, and the men chanted thanks to the gods.

  They drifted south, keeping the boats together so the one barrel of oil smoothed the sea for both. Gale followed gale from the north, and they ran before them, finding shelter at last beneath mountains surrounding a deep bay where they refilled their water breakers, and tried to catch fresh fish, a change from the dried herrings. To their surprise they caught nothing, then at the top of the bay they saw smoke. Curious, they sailed closer and found a great town.

  The people of Lador were neither fishermen nor sailors, but rich traders who spoke several tongues, one of them like ours. When they saw our cargo, the merchants offered good things in return for the herrings, including round discs of yellow, red, and silver metal, a few of which came home at last, ornaments for the women and children. But the Hornish men asked for something they coveted more than Lador’s other marvels.

  All this I told Ennish so he might tell the gods, and slowly the seagull-ravaged eye socket, the bloated flesh, the stench and sounds of nightmare vanished, and I saw his body hard and lean again, his shy smile, the little scar on his left cheek where I once threw a shell and cut it in some childhood argument.

  “You must not cry,” I told myself aloud. “Tell Ennish his story. Tell him the story of Hornish.”

  Chapter Eleven

  Trade and Tribute

  I reminded Ennish how on winter nights when the wind-demon fluttered in the chimney of the Great House, the elders told stories of how our people once used shells and flakes of obsidian as knives. Hooks they made of sharpened bone and tough scrub roots lashed to shanks of bone and shell.

  Axes, adzes, arrow and spearheads they chipped and flaked out of stone, then polished and sharpened with sand and water, long in the making. Stone tips and edges blunted easily and had to be ground constantly; the finest tools and weapons sometimes broke and shattered.

  In Lador all these things were made of something heavier than stone, that was easily sharpened, held its edge, and never broke. They called it iron.

  What the Hornish fishermen asked for their cargo of dried herrings was the iron knife they had seen a workman use to cut a rope.

  “Take these.” The merchants of Lador smiled and gave each of our men an iron knife. “Bring more fish, and we will trade more iron knives.”

  In the Great House at Hornish, I told Ennish, there was an ancient iron knife. One of the Selene’s duties was to wipe it with whale oil each day, and once each year, when the gods returned, she ground its edge bright for the sacrifice. By the time I became the Selene, I used a new knife, but the ancient one hung on the tree at the centre of the Great House, worn to a narrow tongue, dark and silent.

  As our men fondled their iron knives, as they tested the fine edges with their thumbs, as they tried chopping wood with an iron axe, shouting at its strength, one of the Lador merchants found the half-empty barrel in the bows of the first boat, pulled out the bung and stuck in a finger. He sniffed and licked it, and the other merchants ran at his cry, rubbing the whale oil between their fingers, smearing it on their lips, calling for a lamp to see if it would burn.

  When the merchants told them that a film of oil stopped iron from rusting, our men nodded; they knew of its use on the sacred knife of Hornish.

  “A few drops tame the waves,” they said.

  “You waste this on the sea?” Amazed, the merchants offered a slab of iron for the oil left in the barrel. “Bring us more; we will give you whatever you want.”

  It took two men to lift the slab of iron. The Hornish captain warned the others to be quiet.

  “How is the iron made into knives?”

  The merchants told how they traded for charcoal with people inland from Lador, and with others who dug coal and burned it in ovens to make coke. The merchants then traded the charcoal and coke with another village where smiths heated the iron and hammered it to make tools, weapons, ornaments. The iron itself the merchants got from yet another people.

  When they saw the full barrel of whale oil in our second boat, the merchants gave more iron, and two full sets of the tools the smiths used in working it. They wanted to know where we got the oil, but our men pretended they did not understand.

  Promising to return with more oil and herrings, loaded with the iron bars, cooking pots, an axe and knife for each man, and bearing the precious knowledge of how to work the magical metal, our boats left Lador and headed south-west.

  “Our village lies many days’ sail in that direction,” the cautious captain had told the merchants.

  After dark and out of sight of land, they turned and sailed west and north several days, then worked east. As they came in sight of the coast, they saw gulls leave their fishing and fly inland. With no whale oil and the heavy-laden boats low in the water our men ran for a cove, rigged ropes through the iron-sheaved pulley-blocks they had been given at Lador, and dragged the boats to shelter up the steep beach. The storm past, they slid the boats back down, reloaded the iron cargo, and sailed home.

  Hornish welcomed them with a feast. As the men held up their knives, the Selene of that time warned that the iron knife was sacred to the gods.

  “We must do nothing to offend the gods.”

  But when the men showed the axes and cooking pots, the blocks and tackle, and described how the heavy bars of iron could be made into more tools, people forgot the Selene’s words. Everyone gave thanks to the gods for the men’s survival, for their stories of the great town of Lador and its market, most of all for the iron.

  “All that for a little whale oil and a few dried herrings,” they said.

  Near the isthmus there were deposits of the black coal, but it had always been easier to make our fires of driftwood that the sea carried to our doorsteps. Now we learned to burn green wood to make charcoal; to mine coal, fire it in ovens and turn it into coke; to heat the iron and work it. One or two became clever smiths, fed and supported for the marvellous iron tools they made, even learning how to harden the metal in very hot furnaces to make the much stronger steel.

  Year after year, two boats took whale oil and dried fish to Lador, trading it for iron bars, and repeating that Hornish lay many days to the south-west. The old Selene passed on her knowledge to a young girl who used a beautiful knife of Lador steel to sacrifice the children of the gods. Most people forgot the warning of the old Selene, but it hung in the memories of some, like the ancient iron knife hanging silent on the tree in the Great House. As Selene passed on her knowledge to Selene, she always laid her hand on the old knife and repeated, “We must do nothing to offend the gods.”

  Then one day the lookouts on the Horns beat their wooden gongs, and our fishing boats sailed out to challenge a large, brown-sailed boat. The stranger carried the merchants of Lador who had hired the boat and its sailors from a village further south, and after searching for Hornish far to the south-west had explored the coast north.

  When this part of the story was told in the Great House, the storyteller always said that one of our men must have boasted and told the merchants where Hornish really lay, or our boats left Lador and sailed straight to the north. And always, a murmur of disapproval ran around the listeners.

  Hornish wa
s now visited by the trading boat each autumn, and oil and fish were exchanged not just for iron, but for clothes, food, and ornaments we had never seen before. Luxury became necessity. Some spoke sadly of the days when we fed and clothed ourselves, but most wanted the excitement of new goods.

  One year the trading boat, now black-sailed, carried armed soldiers who marched ashore and demanded five barrels of whale oil and ten baskets of dried herrings.

  “Tribute,” said their captain, red-cloaked and arrogant.

  When the villagers did not understand, he made it clear.

  “Seize the tribute,” he ordered his men.

  “Stop,” said Thenk, one of our elders.

  The red-cloaked captain nodded at the soldiers, who speared old Thenk and seized the whale oil and dried herrings, and only then did the grinning captain order the shocked villagers to trade with the merchants.

  Each autumn, the soldiers demanded a heavier tribute until one year the black-sailed boat carried no merchants, no iron, no trade goods. The red-cloaked captain ordered our villagers to fill the boat with oil and dried fish, and seized two children, a girl and a boy, as part of the tribute. Their father fought and was killed; their mother climbed screaming on the tribute boat after her children, was raped, beaten, and tossed down on the stone jetty where her leg broke.

  Threatened by the arrows and spears of the soldiers, none dared go to her help. The tribute boat rowed out through the narrow channel under Skull and Dis, the villagers lining the cliffs, making the evil sign of the Horns. The stolen children’s brother raised his hand to throw a rock, dropped it, clutched the air, and fell to a stone ledge at the foot of Skull, an arrow through his throat.